Table Of ContentGeotechnologies and the Environment
Amy J. Blatt
Health,
Science,
and Place
A New Model
Geotechnologies and the Environment
VOLUME 12
Series Editors:
Jay D. Gatrell, College of Graduate and Professional Studies and Department
of Earth and Environmental Systems, Indiana State University, Terre
Haute, IN, USA
Ryan R. Jensen, Department of Geography, Brigham Young University,
Provo, UT, USA
The “Geotechnologies and the Environment” series is intended to provide specialists
in the geotechnologies and academics who utilize these technologies, with an
opportunity to share novel approaches, present interesting (sometimes counter-
intuitive) case studies, and most importantly to situate GIS, remote sensing, GPS,
the internet, new technologies, and methodological advances in a real world context.
In doing so, the books in the series will be inherently applied and refl ect the rich
variety of research performed by geographers and allied professionals.
Beyond the applied nature of many of the papers and individual contributions,
the series interrogates the dynamic relationship between nature and society. For
this reason, many contributors focus on human-environment interactions. The series
are not limited to an interpretation of the environment as nature per se. Rather,
the series “places” people and social forces in context and thus explore the many
sociospatial environments humans construct for themselves as they settle the
landscape. Consequently, contributions will use geotechnologies to examine both
urban and rural landscapes.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8088
Amy J. Blatt
Health, Science, and Place
A New Model
Amy J. Blatt
TerraFirm International Corp., Inc.
Wayne , PA , USA
ISBN 978-3-319-12002-7 ISBN 978-3-319-12003-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-12003-4
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014956216
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To my husband, whose loving support made
this book possible
Pref ace
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 provides the main impetus
for this book. In this volume, I attempt to re-contextualize the role of medical
geographers within the history of health care reform. The PPACA presents an
excellent window of opportunity for medical geographers to contribute a patient-
centric view of health care that takes into account a person’s place history – i.e.,
where a person lives, works, and plays. As such, this book presents a new model of
patient care that emphasizes a patient’s geographic and medical history through a
broad survey of seemingly disparate disciplines, such as disease ecology,
GIScience, transportation geography, cultural geography, and geographic medi-
cine. What emerges from this volume is a deeper appreciation of the challenges of
national health care reform, and the importance of a new and emerging sub-
discipline of medicine, known as geospatial medicine.
While this book is, admittedly, not an authoritative tome of basic concepts and
developments in medical geography, it does present enough elementary material to
enable the reader to grasp the signifi cance of the current advances in medical geog-
raphy and its historical context. New and timely topics such as disease surveillance
in mass gatherings and knowledge discovery with ‘big data’ are explored, as well as
the seemingly timeless topics of environmental health, disease ecology, and quanti-
tative GIS research.
In addition, examples of successful research programs contributing to the cutting-
edge of medical geographical research are described in these pages. The Center for
Geospatial Medicine and the National Children’s Study are large multi-site research
projects (funded by the National Institutes of Health, or NIH) that are founded on
the principles discussed in this volume. In addition, the Association of American
Geographers and the NIH have collaborated on a report, entitled “Establishing an
NIH-Wide Geospatial Infrastructure for Medical Research: Opportunities,
Challenges, and Next Steps” that describes the importance of geographic thought
and leadership in health-science research.
A book on medical geography is important if it can show that the discipline pro-
vides critical, life-saving insights about patient care and public health that are vital
to human health. Health care services and delivery systems are rapidly changing, as
vii
viii Preface
are ways in which patients are represented in these systems. As described in Chap.
2, the “ways in which patients and their medical conditions are represented, com-
piled and examined – from offi ce visits and prescriptions records to daily personal
blogs and newspaper stories – have also changed…” This volume goes on to explore
how the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of chronic and infectious diseases can
be signifi cantly enhanced through the use of geospatial health intelligence in a clini-
cal setting. The recognition of the importance of place history in clinical care has
yet to be widely accepted and advocated by the medical community. Once this bar-
rier of entry is removed, the possibilities for medical geographers to affect popula-
tion health and patient care, through the use of geographic information systems
(GIS) technologies, will be without bound.
I would like to acknowledge several people who provided the support and assis-
tance necessary to the formulation, research, and publication of this volume. First, I
extend deep gratitude to Frank Galgano and Sarah Wingo of Villanova University,
for generously making the university’s library and archival resources available to
me, during the research phases of this project. In addition to the excellent support
staff at Springer, I would like to call out Rajeswari Balachandran, Marielle Klijn,
and Robert Doe for their superb guidance through every facet of the book publica-
tion and marketing process. I would like to thank Paige Andrew and Katherine
Weimer, who recognized the amount of time and dedication needed for this project
and kindly allowed me to have a more relaxed schedule during my tenure on the
editorial board of their journal. Finally, I would like to thank the many friends and
family members who understood the value of medical geography and its meaning in
my life.
Wayne, PA, USA Amy J. Blatt , Ph.D., GISP
Contents
Part I What Is the Role of Geography in Health Care Reform?
1 Health Care Reform and Disease Surveillance:
Making the Connection .......................................................................... 3
1.1 Introduction .................................................................................... 3
1.2 A Brief History of Health Care Reform in the United States ......... 4
1.3 Role of HIEs in Population Health
and Disease Management ............................................................... 7
References ................................................................................................. 10
2 The Importance of Geography in Disease Surveillance ...................... 11
2.1 Introduction .................................................................................... 11
2.2 A Brief History of Public Health Disease Surveillance
in the United States ......................................................................... 12
2.3 Geospatial Applications in Disease Surveillance:
Current Opportunities and Challenges ........................................... 15
References ................................................................................................. 19
Part II Geographies of Human Health
3 Using Geographic Information for Disease Surveillance
at Mass Gatherings ................................................................................. 25
3.1 Introduction .................................................................................... 25
3.2 A Brief History of Disease Surveillance at Mass Gatherings ........ 27
3.3 Important Public Health Risk Factors at Mass Gatherings ............. 28
3.4 Using Geographic Intelligence to Improve Disease
Surveillance at Mass Gatherings .................................................... 30
3.4.1 Transportation and Population Geographies:
Their Role in Disease Surveillance.................................. 30
ix
